


love is a ghost you can't control

by notbang



Category: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 11:13:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16094519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbang/pseuds/notbang
Summary: It’s late and she’s tired and dangerously lonely, and she can’t deal with this—deal with him—right now, all too nauseatingly aware that his presence in her office after hours and alone is very much in the camp of Not A Good Idea.Post 3x12, Rebecca reflects on their office arrangements.





	love is a ghost you can't control

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the tumblr prompt 'things you didn't think you'd miss'. Canon divergent post 3x12 because pretending the finale doesn't exist is one of my favourite hobbies.

She flinches when the ball connects with the wall somewhere over her left shoulder but only barely, the noise unexpected but familiar enough that it doesn’t properly startle her; when she opens her eyes Nathaniel is standing in front of her desk, eyebrows raised, lips twitching in the suggestion of a smirk and his stupid yellow water polo ball cradled between the very tips of his stupidly long fingers.

“Hey, quick question: what the fuck?”

The digits she was digging unforgivingly into her aching temples slide down her face to fold under her chin as she glares at him expectantly.

“Just offering my assistance.”

“By what? Aggravating my already painful headache with your incessant banging?”

“No,” he says, quirking the side of his mouth up at her. “Providing you with some familiar background noise. Because you can’t think without it anymore.”

She scoffs and swivels around in her chair, picking up her pen and focusing her gaze back on the legal brief in front of her in a manner she hopes is adequately dismissive. “Okay, well. That is the opposite of the truth.”

He’s not so easily dissuaded. “Admit it. Some time in the last eight months you got used to that noise and now you’re trying to concentrate and you can’t, because it’s too quiet.”

He moves around the side of her desk to peek at what she’s working on and she tracks his movements in her periphery, trying to ignore the way the hairs on the back of her neck are slowly but steadily prickling to agitated attention. It’s late and she’s tired and dangerously lonely, and she can’t deal with this—deal with _him_ — right now, all too nauseatingly aware that his presence in her office after hours and alone is very much in the camp of Not A Good Idea. 

“You’re here late,” he says lightly.

“I was trying to get some work done,” she shoots back with a pointed glare. “You should be impressed.”

“Hmm.”He hitches the ball under one of his arms and stuffs his free hand into a pocket, surveying the room. “You’ve been redecorating.”

“Yeah,” she says after a moment. “It, uh… it didn’t make sense to have my back to the door anymore.”

“New desk?” He spreads his fingers across the surface and gives an experimental press downward, pursing his lips in mocking approval. “Looks studier than the last one. Broken it in yet?”

“Oh my god, _stop,_ ” she says, pushing abruptly to her feet.

Nathaniel raises his hands in a gesture of surrender and lowers himself into one of the burgundy armchairs she’d gotten to replace the leather couch she couldn’t bear to look at anymore along with the glass countertop of her desk (along with the man sitting in front of it). Not after she’d become so intimately acquainted with the press of them at the bare skin of her thighs. 

“I won’t say another word. Promise. My lips are sealed.”

He mimes a zipping motion and leans back in the chair, legs crossed and hands entwined around his knee, expression infuriatingly smug.

She manages to skim approximately half a line of her brief before tipping her head back with a frustrated growl. “Why are you even here?”

Annoying, arrogant asshole that he is, Nathaniel widens his eyes at her and shrugs his shoulders upward, pointedly maintaining his muteness until she rolls her eyes and sneers.

“Fine—permission granted, lips unsealed. What do you want?”

“You looked like you needed the company,” he says, clearing his throat. Then, softer, earnest, leaning closer, “I’m worried about you. You look—”

_Lost? Lonely? Like I haven’t been sleeping?_

“You should stop looking,” she says, cutting him off to needlessly shuffle papers around on her desk. “That’s, uh… not really your concern, anymore.”

“Rebecca.”

“Nathaniel,” she mocks.

The open concern on his face makes her skin crawl and her lungs feel too small in her chest and the panic at being stuck in an enclosed space with him starts to grip at her until she can’t take it anymore, she has to break for air. She snatches her phone and mumbles an excuse before fleeing, breathless, to the bathroom.

_Inhale. Exhale. Rinse. Repeat._

He’s with Mona, she reminds herself, back pressed against the toilet door and phone clutched against her collarbone. Not like before when he was biding his time to be with her but properly _with Mona_ , moving on. It’s fair and it’s healthy and it shouldn’t matter to her either way, she knows, but sitting across from an empty space and having him standing there, open-postured and looking like he’s ready to un-pause whatever unnamed thing between them she couldn’t bring herself to hit play on are two very different things.

There’s rings under her eyes when she dares to look in the mirror, hands clenching the sink so hard her knuckles pull taut and turn white. She’s tired, so tired—of thinking, of second guessing, of feeling guilty and being afraid. There’s a reason she clings to denial—the self awareness isn’t nearly as fun.

He shouldn’t even be here. But his voice is low like it was for the two weeks they’d lied awake talking and his eyes are warm like the way he’d started looking at her in the low light of an elevator and never really stopped, and it’d be _so easy_ to just indulge him, to let her guard down and let him in.

He’s still there when one shaky foot in front of the other brings her back, his blue button-down traded for peppered grey tee. The law firm lamplight is far more kinder to him than it has any right to be, the gentle glow sliding down the side of his face like a caress and highlighting the fondest angles of him. She squeezes her fingers into fists to stop herself from reaching out to check if the fabric’s as soft as she remembers.

“Oh,” she says, pausing in the doorway in surprise. “You’re still here. And you got changed,” she adds evenly, clearing her throat before making a move back towards her desk.

“You relaxed,” he counters. “I’m glad.”

She lets him intercept her, all too aware that it’s a mistake to have him this close, to have him in any proximity to her at all. But the space he still maddeningly occupies in her mind flares up hot and insistent and wanting, and she can’t do it, can’t bring herself to pull away. 

“I’m tired, Nathaniel,” she admits, the words scraping at her throat on the way out, eyes flickering shut. “I’m tired of pretending. Tired of fighting things I don’t want to feel.”

“Then stop fighting,” he murmurs, tilting down, and his face is a maddening hair’s breadth from hers.

She shakes her head slowly, near imperceptibly, the tip of her nose ghosting his on each pass. “I can’t. You know I can’t.”

“Why not?”

His hand slides into her hair to cup the side of her face and she can’t stop the whimper that claws its way out of her throat as she leans in and up at the touch, hating how desperately she melts from the familiarity because despite the determination behind her decision she’s not quite ready to let him be something else she’s not supposed to miss.

“Because you’re not here,” she whispers, scrunching her eyes tighter. “You’re not here and you’re not mine.”

His palm on her cheek dissipates the second she speaks the words and she bites her lip at the sudden loss of contact.

“And whose fault is that?”

He’s not in front of her when she opens her eyes but he’s still there, back on the other side of the desk now, his face as open and vulnerable and oddly emboldened as when he told her _it was about you—me and you_ and she hadn’t known how to react except by running away.

“You’re right,” she says with a hopeless shrug. “That choice is on me. Both times. But I made it. Passively, actively, it doesn’t matter—that’s where we are. And you’re with Mona, and… that hurts. Yeah, thinking about that still hurts, because it’s always going to feel like you chose her over me but I get it, Nathaniel, I do. I never gave you the chance to choose me. And you’re right. She didn’t deserve any of this.”

His eyes drop down to his shoes, his mouth drawn into a solemn line, and she forces herself to take a steadying half-step back. 

“So I need you to go, because I can’t move on with you here,” she says. She sniffs, gesturing towards Darryl's office. “I can barely move on with you over there.”

He raises his eyebrows. Skims his thumbnail across his forehead. 

“Okay,” he says. “If that’s what you want.”

As if she’s ever been able to make sense of what she _wants_ in any of this.

“Although thank you, I guess, for not having a whole song and dance about all the places we… you know,” she says, making a vague but suggestive hand gesture. “I know there’s a lot of material to work with.”

“I still could, you know,” he offers, tone hesitantly teasing. “You might not know this about me, but I can tap dance.”

The laughter bubbles up out of her before she can stop it. “Of course you can.”

It’s always caught her unawares, the way he can make her laugh.

For a moment she lets herself think _sequoia;_ thinks of alternate universe Rebecca and how her knuckles would have been unwavering against the wood of his door, stumbling over his threshold and mumbling _I want what you want_ against his mouth with all the longing and desperation she wishes she were brave to let herself feel. But then she pushes back at the fantasy of it, squashes the phantom memory down and deep inside her where she hopes it’ll sting a little less.

“You’re sure?” he checks, because he’s always been surprisingly good at that.

She nods with far more certainty than she feels. “I’m sure. Begone—what are you again? Memory spirit? Polterguy?”

“Man of your dreams?” he suggests. “In a strictly literal sense of the word.”

“Well,” she says, barking out a wry laugh, “there were definitely dreams—you have that part right.”

Her eyes are heavy on his back when he huffs out a laugh and turns away, helpless to deny her request now that she’s managed to make herself sure of it.

“Nathaniel? I’m… sorry for being such a coward. Not for not being ready, just… for not being able to give you an answer. Because I’ve been on the other side of not having closure before and it sucks.” She bites down on her lip as he hovers to listen. “And I know this doesn’t even really count because you’re not really here. But it’s a step, right?”

He doesn’t respond, only smiling wanly at her over his shoulder as he heads again for the exit, then pausing in the doorway for a moment with his hands buried deep in the dark denim of his pockets. 

“It’s just as bad, isn’t it?”

“What?”

He nods towards his side of the room. “The space where I used to be.”

The air vacates her lungs in a sharp breath as she follows his gaze, eyes sliding over the expanse of floor where for eight long months his desk butted up beside hers. When she turns her attention back to where he stood he’s finally gone and she’s alone, office as empty as the ache in her chest left unabating.

She rolls the ball back and forth between her hands and digs her fingers into the grooves in the yellow rubber in thought. 

*

This time, she knocks on his door.

He’s in early the next morning, the predictable office outlier as always, and when she strides towards him with a strange surge of purpose she’s not quite sure if the look on his face is surprise at her presence or panic, and understandably perhaps it’s a little of both.

“You need to move back,” she says before he can greet her. “To the other office.”

He lets out a breath and looks down at his hands where they’re folded in front of him on the desk. “Rebecca. We talked about this. It’s not a good idea for us—”

“I want this office,” she interrupts, squaring her shoulders and jutting her chin. “Because it’s mine. Or at least it was mine, before you came and kicked me out of it. The other office has always been yours. And Darryl’s. And his dreamcatchers work better in there, so.”

The confusion is evident when he glances back up at her, studying her face for a long moment, and she wonders what it is that he finds that makes him swallow and dip his head. She tries her hardest not to fidget but can feel herself squirm under his stare.

“If that’s what you want,” he says eventually.

She hates the way her stomach clenches in on itself at the words.

“It is,” she says quickly. “I’m the senior partner of this firm, and I want my old office back. So I’ll arrange someone to move our stuff.”

She watches the switch, furtive, from the break room; mug of steeping tea cradled close to her chest as her sightline shifts through the slats, tracking the way the pieces of their ever-complicated puzzle are exchanged and fall into place, watching their worlds rearrange and restabilise as if by inevitable osmosis.

Nathaniel stands in the doorway to his old office like he’s steeling himself, like he’s reeling, like he’s moving back in with a ghost. She tamps down on the flicker of guilt that flares up inside of her at forcing him back there when he’d been the one of the two of them smart enough to properly pull away; sinks into her seat beneath the billboard and tries not to think of stationery supplies and his desk, his leather chair, their eight months of lack of self control as a punishment she’s leaving him to deal with.

It won’t be so hard for him, she tells herself. He has someone else to fill the space.


End file.
